22 July 2009 | Belgrade's Gay Pride Parade is drawing vehement opposition from some nationalist and church organisations.

“Gay pride won’t be a provocation but only a political protest which will say no to discrimination against the LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender] population in Serbia,” one of the organisers, Dragana Vuckovic, announced at a conference in which the September parade was unveiled.

Misa Vacic, spokesperson for the nationalist Serbian National Movement 1389, told Balkan Insight that the parade will not happen, without revealing his group's intentions. “We are not calling for violence, but we have to keep our city clean from the gays and defend it from them, no matter in which way,” he said.

Serbia's first Pride march was forcibly halted in Belgrade in June 2001 when opponents seriously injuring several participants and policemen.

In March of this year the Serbian parliament approved a unified Anti-Discrimination Law which prohibits, amongst other things, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and transgender status in all areas.

The first thing that spokesperson for the right-wing Otacastevni Pokret Obraz group, Mladen Obradovic, noticed about this year's planned march is that it is scheduled for a day before an important holiday, the 'Birth of our Blessed Lady.' He said that Obraz needs to stop the parade at any price.

Asked how they planned to stop the march, Obradovic quoted Serbian military officer Dragutin Gavrilovic who, in an address to Serbian soldiers before Belgrade’s fall in World War I said: "The honor of Belgrade, our capital, must not be stained."

Another organiser of Gay Pride 2009, Maja Savic, said that march promotors understand that the event is high risk and will do everything in their power to prevents incidents. She added that Professor Zoran Dragisic from the Faculty for Security Studies wrote a security study for the event. The study's conclusion is that, although the parade falls into the category of a high-risk event, it can pass safely with appropriate security measures.

Among the opponents is another nationalist association Srpski Sabor Dveri, which is taking a less confrontational approach in its peaceful battle against the LGBT community. “We are against the parade but we won’t organise any counter-protest due to our policy of fighting against these things with our pro-life project, which promote family-life values in accordance with Serbian tradition," Vladan Glisic from Srpski Sabor Dveri told Balkan Insight.

Although the path of the parade remains unknown, the organisers said it will be held somewhere in the downtown.

This article is courtesy of Balkan Insight, the online publication of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, which contains analytical reports, in-depth analyses and investigations and news items from throughout the region covering major challenges of the political, social and economic transition in the Balkans.

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